#// Legit these are all the Brobecks I don’t own this music for any tag creepers

[musesby-rach]

So the other day (4/30) I presented a senior recital that allowed me to present some songs I’ve created over my senior year (and other years) as a music/mprt major here at ccc. Under the cut is a full breakdown of the songs, along with the recordings I made. I recorded most of the instruments you’ll hear in the recordings by myself...with the exception of some previous piano works and obviously the drums. The piano was my bandmate Sadie Temple and the drums were my brother, Abel. As a forwarning, there are some songs in here with ah...darker subjects, including references to drxg use and wars. Those are marked with a star. I promise you they’re not bad at all. Feel free to pick up a CD on the way out which are the fully produced songs! 

1. Boring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4QL8_3zP7Q

“I decided to open up my recital with Boring. This song was created in response to a sort of...need to have a song that summed up my existence as a kid growing up in the 2000s. It’s inspired from old music by the Strokes and those sort of outro songs you hear from some of the early 2000s movies. I had released this track on my txmblr maybe a month or so before this recital started and this is one track that’s kind of changed the most over the semester. You won’t hear it immediately...but, heh, I’ll let you get through the recital before I say anymore.” 

2. Better Than Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFDT5HWYVKA 

“I was very tempted to open my recital with this song but it lacked the same lazy energy Boring did. This song is a laughable attempt at making my self loathing humor a bit more palatable. I wrote the riff lyrics “everyone is better than me” years ago in a notebook and this came from a weird place of self loathing. I just thought...jeez I kinda need to lighen up a bit -- what better way to make this a bit lighter than to make fun of myself a bit and throw in some random theatrics. This song features my bandmate Sadie Temple on piano, hope you like it. 

-- This is also the first instance of me making up names to fit in rhymes before anyone asks who Nathan is. I don’t know any Nathans, thanks.” 

3. Visitation of a Ghost * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arFK8InsFkk

* = drug use

“This next song really is a bit of a wild card. I intended it to be a halloween song that I released, but something in production just got wacky and I never got around to doing it. I can’t exactly tell you what this song was inspired by, I just know the majority of these songs were me playing around noises before coming up with a crazy idea. At the end of it, I just sort of ended up with a murder mystery that I had no idea what to do with. I hope you get a weird vibe from it, when I sent this track to my brother he said it freaked him out a bit.  

-- also, I swear I’m not on any drugs I just needed to set the scene for things to go wrong so that line pertaining to drugs is right at the beginning. I promise I’m fine.”

4. Creep You Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyRY8jqpkw

“So this song is in a notably different style than the rest of the songs you’ll hear on this recital. For one, I changed my style of voice from the style that I normally use to a bit more of a nasaly tone. Additionally, this song in itself was a big experimentation I had with different synth and keyboard noises. The song essentially started with two ideas: the main keyboard riff in ostinato (continually repeating) and the bass line underneath that. I wrote this song mostly because I was sick of playing songs where the bassline was boring. So I wanted to make a bassline that was as interesting as possible and had the ability to (sort of) support this weird whispy keyboard melody I created. The drums were also a very interesting portion of this song, mostly ‘cause I didn’t really write them? I let Abel do whatever he wanted when I gave him the backing track and my vocals. He just kind of came up with something that fit, and then I tweaked it a little bit just so they didn’t overpower some moving lines that I wanted to hear... The vocals were a bit of an oddity, mostly ‘cause you can’t quite tell what I’m on about until the bridge of the song. This was my weird drunk rambling about wearing my girlfriend’s clothes...her name isn’t Sarah, I just have weird issues with putting girlfriend’s names in songs for some reason. Anyway, this is Creep You Out” 

5. Why I Don’t Smile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFeNV3P9FU

“So the title is purposefully misleading. It sounds like it’s supposed to be sad when in reality it’s a bit of a joke...That seems to be the running theme of tonight’s recital: Oliver Elliot is a bit of a joke. Anyway, I wrote this song maybe a couple years ago in response to this sort of weird comment I always got “why don’t I smile.” For anyone that’s known me for a long time, they know that I’ve been through a lot -- I’m a lot better now, really, I am. But sometimes I don’t seem all that happy. But it turns out...it’s just kinda my face, I’m not sad, I’m not down, everything fine. I just don’t need to smile 100 times a day to prove that I’m alright. This song kind of is an attempt to make fun of that a bit.” 

6. I Will, Tonight * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-_KISB159M * = topics of war 

“So I put the warning in this song for the vaguest of reasons. This song was inspired by the wave of songs that were released about this...horrid fear of nuclear fallout? About a year ago my favorite band at the time released a song that kind of candidly talked about it, and needless to say it freaked me out a bit. So I took a bit of a happier spin on the topic and made that feeling a little more palatable for me to deal with. This song features solos from my bandmate Sadie Temple on piano because Lord knows I can’t play piano as well as she can. It features a solo from Axel Spader, my brother in law on rhythm guitar. It also features a nice bass solo from Acadia Elliot, my sister in law.”

7. Bike Ride  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar15s2I2vdM

“This is a song I wrote awhile ago. I can’t even remember where the inspiration for this came from. The only major change to it is the fact that it’s no longer acoustic or slow. It’s a bit dancy and it’s a nice way to sort of end the fast pace part of the recital. Hope you like it.”

8. Le Veilo Pour Deux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD0iZilkDFQ

“So this is a bit of a sappy song, ha. For those of you who don’t know...I’m planning to propose to my girlfriend one of these days. She knows it’s coming one day, I know it’s coming one day. So I wrote this song around the time I knew I was gonna marry this girl. This song is dedicated to Iris.” 

9. Boring (Slow) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU_-TPBQtO0

“So remember in the beginning of the recital where I said that Boring had a big rework? Or at least hinted at it? Well the moment has finally arrived. Here’s my last song of the recital. I promise you this isn’t the same song you heard at the beginning. This song was kind of inspired from a bunch of assignments I was given in the last month of school. I was instructed to take a song and reproduce it for a different effect, this kind of served as a final project that I would include in my recital. I was also tasked with a bunch of different things: one obviously was to finish school unscathed, and the other was to figure out how the heck to play piano to pass another class I was taking. So I decided to challenge myself and write a song that heavily featured piano...but as something that I could play. Boring was a song that I felt really strongly about, and I knew I could easily rework it to fit my skills. This resulted in...well this version, a much slower ballad. This also allowed me a bunch of different orchestration opportunities such as arranging a small string section (played by Acadia and Axel). I hope you like this reworked version, it took a lot to get it done.” 

(Encore) Die Alone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EChs3eKvTKs

“This is literally the best song I’ve ever written, and it’d be a dang shame if I didn’t play this as an encore piece. Thanks for coming to listen to me play, thank you to my friends for supporting me once again! Please pick up a CD your way out. This is Die Alone.”